Now, though, it is different. This speech will be available to parents before their children hear it, so they can prepare those children for what they will hear, or, t they want them to grow up to not listen to authority, they can keep them home from school that day (I actually know parents who are planning to do this, even though in my district, they are allowing parents to opt their child out of the speech).

That’s right. This one’s different because this President is going to greater lengths to reach out to parents to calm their fears and reassure them. And still the right of right are freaking out, because they can’t think of any non-nefarious reason for that evil man to talk to their children.

I can think of one reason that makes more sense than any other for the President to speak to children on Tuesday. It’s a warmup and practice for the speech he’ll be giving to the children on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

I believe that the there will be two challenges the future generations will need to overcome. First is being able to focus on tasks that require a long attention span (I have two teenagers). Second will be the ability to intelligently sort through the overwhelming amount of information they will have access to. This will require high levels of critical thinking, and considering the exponential growth of the amount of information available, potentially different than our methods.

This is why the GOP is going down the tubes with their extreme views and behavior by making this an issue.

Bottom line, if you don’t trust your children’s minds in the hands of educators, most instructional material can be spun as indoctrination.

As someone with 15 years of experience creating instructional material for middle school and high school, I can say with 100% certainty that the content shown is simple, sound, and fosters independent critical thinking. Obviously, since it’s open-ended, it could be quite easily be abused by any determined indoctrinator. But that will always be the case, as the teacher is the one who guides the discussion.

If students are to become sound independent critical-thinking adults, they need to establish the habit of asking the right questions about the messages other people are trying to sell them. Habits are formed by repetition. These are good exercises.

I’d REALLY like to ask folks with kids to please consider the utter maelstrom of messages their growing children will encounter as they grow to adulthood. Do you want your kids to accept all these social, political, and philosophical sales pitches at face value? Or do you want them to have developed the tools to figure out what’s going on with each messenger and the half of the story they are shopping.

I am explicitly suggesting to all parents out there that there is NO good substitute for teaching the American children of the 21st century to be active editors of all the BS that folks will try to ram down their gullets. None.

Notice how easily the format of the content shown above could be adapted to say a television commercial or a video of someone trying to sell a car.

……….right….

What does Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Paul Robson and President Obama have in common, they we both activise but were accuse from the right as being a communist & a socialist.